King County: Startup Weekend Seattle EDU

Welcome to the Seattle Startup Weekend EDU event! Our event is similar to the traditional Startup Weekend Event, except it includes a fourth crucial participant category: educator. Who better to speak about problems in education than educators and school leaders? We’re incredibly excited about this upcoming Seattle Startup Weekend EDU – we’re adding a few twists and turns to make this a great event that is designed to address the challenges our students and educators face on a day-to-day basis. So how does that work?

All of the pitches on Friday and companies demoed on Sunday will be educator approved and designed to solve problems in the education space, broadly defined (not restricted to K-12 or other “formal” education).

In addition to the traditional crowdsourced pitches, we have sponsor schools and school networks pitching ideas as well.

This isn’t a mere hackathon. Hackathons produce products or features; Startup Weekend EDUs produce new ventures. These could take the form of a new startup, or an internal venture incubated by a school. By bringing together education rockstars, marketing maestros, design gurus, relentless hackers, and serial entrepreneurs, ventures launched at a Startup Weekend get a team completely aligned around their mission, working with a harmony that’s hard to find anywhere else.

So what does the weekend look like?

Friday night is all about networking and the pitches. Those with an idea who are brave enough will stand in front of 120 strangers and give a 1-minute elevator pitch to the crowd. Teams form organically around the most compelling pitches, and then spend the next 48 hours (minus sleep and our delicious catered food) hacking away on your product and business plan.

Saturday and Sunday are work days.You and your team validate the problem, market, and customer, ideate and iterate relentlessly, and prototype your team’s solution. Mentors will be on hand throughout the time to help you your idea from a fledgling concept into a working company with huge potential in less than two days. While a small web app or other interactive deliverable is ideal, example final products include promotional websites, mock-ups, or anything else that would convince an audience that your product is viable, compelling, and worth developing further.

Sunday night is where the jury panel comes in. Seasoned startup veterans will scrutinize MVPs to evaluate your chances of real world success, and the most promising product will win its team a grab bag of great tools to launch your company. From there? Well, it’s all up to you. Startup Weekend EDU can only help you start your dream. It’s up to you to live it out.

BONUS : This Startup Weekend is a special one! During the weekends of November 15th and November 22nd, Up Global, the parent company of Startup Weekend, is holding its Global Startup Battle. This SW EDU will be part of that battle and we’ll be having a special regional event pitting the winners from about 8 Northwest cities against one another in a final showdown in front of an audience of over 400 people. This is a unique opportunity to explode onto the startup scene.